{"id":19200,"date":"2026-08-26T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T10:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/?p=19200"},"modified":"2026-08-25T13:11:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-25T17:11:34","slug":"book-review-annie-mouses-route-66-adventure-anne-slanina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/2026\/08\/book-review-annie-mouses-route-66-adventure-anne-slanina\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Review
Annie Mouse’s Route 66 Adventure
Anne Slanina and Kelsey Collins"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"I’ve known Dr. Anne Maro Slanina <\/span>for several years. I’ve attended presentations she’s given while wearing mouse ears, and we have shared group meals at conferences. I have read one of her Annie Mouse books, read preview excerpts from others, and posted positive comments. This is my first time reviewing one. Dr. Slanina is a retired educator with a Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction. Annie Mouse targets ages 5-12, a range I left behind long ago. I’m also pretty sure that no regular readers of this blog fit into that range either. And that, I suppose, is why I’ve never reviewed any of Slanina’s books before.<\/p>\n

\"\"Three of the Annie Mouse books involve Route 66. The author is a big fan of the road and travels it frequently. That is where, of course, I met her. In Annie Mouse’s Route 66 Adventure<\/em>, she applies not only the road knowledge she gained through her travels, but also photographs she took herself. The book covers a near full-length drive of the historic route from Joliet, IL, to Needles, CA. Making the journey is the Mouse family. There’s Mommy and Daddy, of course. The Mouse children include Annie’s older brothers, Sam and Bobby; older sister Jenny; and some unnamed younger siblings. The trip’s purpose is to visit Mommy Mouse’s cousins in Needles. <\/p>\n

\"\"Annie is the journal’s narrator. She is also its photographer. When Annie first learns of the planned trip, her excitement grows even bigger when she is told she would be allowed to take her own pictures. Those pictures appear exactly as you might expect from a young mouse making a scrapbook-style journal of her family vacation. More importantly, they appear exactly as they should to help young humans flesh out the words beside them. Sometimes, with the help of illustrator Kelsey Collins, Mouse family members appear in those pictures just as you would expect in vacation snapshots. There are also plenty of Collins’ delightful drawings in the book outside the frames of the photographs.<\/p>\n

Annie Mouse’s Route 66 Family Vacation is another Route 66 book<\/em> in the Annie Mouse series. It appears to tell the story of the Mouse family’s westbound Route 66 trip in greater detail, but without the photographs. It is, however, well illustrated with drawings by Kelsey Collins. The third book is Annie Mouse’s Second Route 66 Photo Journal,<\/em> which tells of a second Mouse family Route 66 trip, this one eastbound, in the photo journal format with illustrations by Melinda Hood. What is sometimes called a fourth in the series is actually an ebook combining the two photo journal books.<\/p>\n

Annie Mouse’s Route 66 Adventure: A Photo Journal<\/em>,  Anne Maro Slanina (author) and <\/span>Kelsey Collins (illustrator)<\/span>, Annie Mouse Books (May 13, 2011), 8.5 x 11 inches, 48 pages, ISBN 978-0979337963
\nAvailable through Amazon<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve known Dr. Anne Maro Slanina for several years. I’ve attended presentations she’s given while wearing mouse ears, and we have shared group meals at conferences. I have read one of her Annie Mouse books, read preview excerpts from others, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[86],"tags":[39,41],"class_list":["post-19200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-book","tag-us66"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1WE0S-4ZG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19200"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19277,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19200\/revisions\/19277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dennygibson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}